After the Jenny Lind tour ended, Barnum briefly but seriously considered moving the family to Philadelphia, where he owned a museum and a country house, but between them Charity and Caroline persuaded him to stay in Fairfield. With that, he redoubled his commitment to his adopted hometown, involving himself in an ambitious real-estate development project in adjacent Bridgeport that would draw more on his energy and his wealth than his wisdom.
Across the Pequonnock River from Bridgeport lay what Barnum called a “beautiful plateau” and what an early travel writer named Timothy Dwight IV called a “cheerful and elegant piece of ground,” the “surrounding country . . . gay and brilliant, perhaps without a parallel.” At the time the travel piece was written, about 1815, Bridgeport consisted of a hundred houses situated on both sides of the Pequonnock, near its mouth. The bridge connecting them gave the village its name. The eastern portion of the community did not develop over time as the western portion had, something Barnum blamed on “want of means of access” to the beautiful plateau. He decided to solve the problem directly, and with a prominent attorney in the town, William H. Noble, set about creating on this fine piece of land the new city of East Bridgeport. Noble had inherited a fifty-acre homestead on the eastern bank of the river, half of which Barnum bought for $20,000 on the last day of October 1851. Together the two men quietly purchased another 174 acres of adjacent land, and then set about, in conjunction with the city of Bridgeport, building a series of new bridges across the river. Barnum and Noble quickly laid out a grid of tree-lined streets on their property and marked off lots for residences and businesses. At the heart of the new city would be a six- to eight-acre grove of trees preserved as Washington Park. (To this day, Barnum Avenue and Noble Avenue cross at the northwest corner of the park.) Soon they began selling the lots at cost, keeping every other one for themselves, expecting to make their money when the value of the lots increased. If that were not enough, they also lent the new landowners the money to buy the land and build on it, allowing them to draw down their debts in irregular payments as small as $5.1
This remarkable deal had a few stipulations: the property must be developed within a year, the style of the houses and buildings had to meet with their approval and be situated back from the street, and the lots must be surrounded by fences and kept tidy. Barnum did not say where the ideas behind these restrictions came from, but the general principles by which they developed their new city anticipated by half a century those of the Garden City movement in England and the City Beautiful movement in the United States. The principles also resemble the ideals of the New Urbanism movement that began in the United States in the 1980s.
With head-spinning rapidity, the first factory in the new city rose, and by New Year’s Day 1852, a group of young coach makers had leased it and moved in. Other businesses and residents followed quickly, and after just thirty months there were “dwellings, stores, factories, etc., which have cost an aggregate of nearly one million dollars.” By the middle of 1853, the new city also boasted its own hotel, church, schoolhouse, and sawmill, and the lots themselves had increased in value tenfold, meaning the value of the land that Barnum and Noble still held had increased by at least this much. Barnum wrote with some satisfaction that he had made a handsome offer to buy out Noble and that his partner had turned him down.
At this point in his autobiography, Barnum unfurled for the first time one of his most memorable phrases, describing what would be a guiding philosophy for his investments in and around Bridgeport: “profitable philanthropy.” He would build bridges to the new city, pay for the laying out of streets, the planting of trees, and the preservation of land for a park, and even lend money at a favorable rate to those who wished to contribute to the overall beauty and desirability of the place. But he would do it in a way that enhanced his own investment. He would undertake good deeds that would benefit himself as well as others. The idea of improving the city and richly sharing in the financial advantages of those improvements would guide his relationship to the two Bridgeports for the rest of his days. In the end, the ledger would be very much in favor of the Bridgeports.2
This “pet scheme” of developing East Bridgeport soon became an obsession of Barnum’s. He had “East Bridgeport on the brain,” and thus was perhaps too open to new proposals to see the city grow and prosper. Having made so much money from his museum, Tom Thumb, and Jenny Lind, he became increasingly eager to leverage that wealth in new speculations, but he became increasingly careless about how he did so. Once involved, he was lax about keeping tabs on his investments. In addition to his East Bridgeport development, he held properties in Bridgeport and elsewhere in Connecticut, farther off in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and even farther afield. One of his cousins, a scoundrel who had followed the Lind tour scalping tickets, was by this time operating out of Cleveland, where he forged Barnum’s name on notes amounting to $40,000, which he then blew on gambling and female companionship. He later claimed in court that Barnum had known about and not objected to the forgeries, which led to years of legal troubles for the showman.
One of Barnum’s other projects was to move a small clock-making business in which he owned stock from the nearby town of Litchfield to an “immense” building in East Bridgeport, from which, he believed, would eventually emerge more than five thousand clocks a month. He estimated that it would bring six hundred new residents to the city. The Litchfield clockmaker merged with another small clockmaker that had already moved to the city, the merger was incorporated as the Terry and Barnum Manufacturing Company, and in 1852 they built a factory for this business. As successful as this venture was as an example of the sort of development Barnum wished to see in East Bridgeport, it led directly to a much bigger outlay and greater risk for Barnum.
Just a few years later, he would write, a visitor named Chauncey Jerome called at Iranistan. He was an inventor and the president of the Jerome Clock Company, a large and well-known clockmaker in New Haven, which employed in good times as many as a thousand people. Jerome had paid for an impressive new church in New Haven and had recently been elected mayor of that city. The company would relocate to East Bridgeport, Jerome said, if Barnum would help his business secure a substantial loan. In the autobiography, Barnum went on at length about the due diligence he did to be sure Jerome’s company was solid. But in the end it was not solid. Barnum never addressed what would seem to be the best reason for him to have been skeptical of the deal: that a newly elected official would willingly initiate a plan to move a thousand workers out of his city. Jerome himself had a different story to tell: that he never called at Iranistan to begin with; that his company, which had by then been run by his son and other investors, had been in good financial shape until it got involved with the Terry and Barnum Company; and that Barnum and Terry’s manufacturing company was itself in debt. If Jerome’s account were the true one, it seems that Barnum could have just as easily blamed his coming financial troubles on Terry as on Jerome, but he did not.3
In any case, Barnum made the decision to involve himself with the Jerome Clock Company, offering to endorse up to $110,000 in notes to help it through a lean time. At this point, Barnum seems to have relied too heavily on his bookkeeper son-in-law, David W. Thompson, husband of Caroline, who oversaw for the busy Barnum all of the East Bridgeport businesses. Barnum began to endorse notes for the Jerome Company willy-nilly, wittingly or unwittingly putting his name on nearly half a million dollars in notes. These notes were used to prop up the Jerome Company, until it went bankrupt in early 1856, paying its debts at only twelve to fifteen cents on the dollar. “To cap the climax,” Barnum wrote, the company “never removed to East Bridgeport at all.”
When the Jerome Company went bankrupt, all but a few of the many balls Barnum had been juggling came thudding to earth at once, “and then,” he admitted, “I failed!” His financial situation was so complicated that he was forced to file for bankruptcy. In his later autobiography, he made his bankruptcy out to be a complete shock. In that book, from the distance of years, he was able to blithely write that his agent brought him “the refreshing intelligence that I was a ruined man!”4
However, as early as the previous summer, Barnum had begun to make moves to protect parts of his fortune, proving that he knew his financial footing was growing increasingly risky. First he sold for a dollar his long-term lease on the first of the two buildings now housing the American Museum to his chief assistant, John Greenwood Jr., who the next day sold it to Charity Barnum for the same amount, thus protecting that asset. At about the same time, he sold the contents of the museum to Greenwood and Henry D. Butler, another associate, for twice what he had spent to create the collection—but he held their notes for “nearly the entire amount.” Greenwood and Butler then rented the museum building from Charity for $19,000 a year above the annual lease amount, which would provide the Barnums with steady income no matter what happened next.5
In a letter he wrote in early February, Barnum began, “The clock folks have wound me up. Never mind. My wife owns the Museum lease, which will give her an annual income for the next 23 years that will support us.” He also moved other properties in Bridgeport into Charity’s name. In the two weeks after he declared bankruptcy, he had mortgaged Iranistan several times for a total of $102,000, an amount more than three times its assessed value. He then used this money to pay his Bridgeport debts to bankers and shopkeepers and made good to local banks some $40,000 in notes they held for the Jerome Company.6
Within days, courts in Connecticut had appointed assignees to handle his assets there, including his East Bridgeport holdings and Iranistan itself, from which the Barnums moved immediately. On February 14 the New York Post reported, “Iranistan is untenanted, all of the furniture having been removed to this city and sold.” The Barnums now lived “in a very frugal manner” in a furnished rental house on West Eighth Street, near Sixth Avenue, many blocks north of the museum that was no longer, at least legally if not in any other way, his. To punctuate their change in circumstances, Barnum wrote that his new landlady and her family were boarding with his family, which was sadly reminiscent of a time in the city when the Barnums had taken in boarders out of immediate financial necessity; he added that he was “once more nearly at the bottom of the ladder.”7
Neither Charity nor her husband could be anything but depressed by this situation, and by April they had moved again, this time on the “orders” of Charity’s doctor, to “a secluded spot on Long Island where the sea wind lends its healthful influence.” Charity was evidently having a hard time adjusting to the loss of their elegant home and servants, and Barnum was himself affected. He wrote that even his “own constitution . . . through the excitements of the last few months, has most seriously failed.” He was, understandably if uncharacteristically, “in the depths.”8
But even now he could not keep his hands off his business. In early February he wrote to a friend in hopes that the friend’s dental assistant, who was Turkish, could help the museum’s nominal proprietor Greenwood acquire “two beautiful Circassian slaves.” The Circassians inhabited a region that touched on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, and the women were famous for their beauty and much desired by sultans as concubines. Barnum reported that he had already written to the U.S. consul in Constantinople, but he was hoping to gain further Turkish assistance for Greenwood. “For my own part,” he wrote disingenuously, “I have renounced business & care forever.” He and his family would stay on Long Island for four months, living on the seaside farm in Westhampton of a man who had often sent shells and other curiosities to the American Museum. One day Barnum and the farmer were out walking on the beach when they came upon some men and a twelve-foot black whale, dead but still “hard and fresh.” Barnum immediately counted out a few dollars to the men who had found it, and shipped it to the museum, “where it was exhibited in a huge refrigerator for a few days.” People swarmed to see it, as Barnum knew they would, and Greenwood and Butler sent him a portion of the receipts, enough to pay the boarding bill for his family for their whole stay in Westhampton. The farmer could not believe Barnum’s luck, especially since it was the first black whale he had ever seen washed up on that shore. “I wonder if that ain’t ‘providential,’ ” the farmer remarked, with a laugh that “resounded, echoed, and re-echoed through the whole neighborhood.”9
Barnum’s financial misfortune inspired the glee of those who had long despised what he stood for, as well as those who no longer felt the economic need to pretend to be his friend; he included a number of newspaper editors in the latter category. But it also became a morality tale of a man brought down by his vanity, of one who had often played fast with others now being the victim of such “cuteness.” Even before his bankruptcy became official, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to his wife, pointed out “that P. T. Barnum has assigned his property,—which is what old people called—the gods visible again.” By “old people” he meant the ancients and their belief that the gods would step forward to administer justice where it was deserved. James Gordon Bennett and other newspapermen saw Barnum’s downfall as the final chapter of his autobiography: “The author of that book glorifying himself as a millionaire . . . is completely crushed out. . . . It is a case eminently adapted to ‘point a moral or adorn a tale.’ ” As for the Richmond Daily Dispatch, always eager to see any situation through a regionalist lens, it blamed Barnum’s troubles on his Yankee sharpness and delighted that a different Yankee sharper, the Connecticut clockmaker Jerome, had “stopped the clock of Barnum, and prevented it from ever ticking again.” The paper predicted, prematurely, that Barnum’s “sayings and doings will no longer be chronicled by the New York press,” and scolded that when his bankruptcy was “added, by way of appendix to his autobiography, [it] will prove an antidote to the bane of that shameless production.”10
But, as Barnum related, a strong gale of support arose from “hosts of hitherto unknown friends” who were eager to offer him “something more than sympathy.” Many people proposed to lend or give him money to get back on his feet or to organize public benefits “by the score, the returns of which would have made me quite independent.” A letter signed by more than a thousand New Yorkers, among them Cornelius Vanderbilt, journalists, businessmen, hoteliers, the Delmonico’s restaurant family, and at least one prominent general, appeared in New York papers in early June, expressing support and proposing benefits on his behalf—and drawing the predictable scorn of the Herald. Theater owners such as Laura Keene and William Niblo offered the proceeds of an evening’s performance. In Bridgeport a large meeting of citizens, called by the mayor to express their collective sympathy and support, featured addresses by prominent citizens, resolutions, and the reading of a letter from Barnum, an event such as he himself might have organized. (Aware that people could see his own hand behind this gathering, Barnum felt the need to assert in his letter, “I knew nothing of this movement until your letter informed me of it.”) In the days after the meeting, a group of his neighbors across the city line in Bridgeport offered him a loan of $50,000.11
With some exceptions, Barnum declined these many outpourings of financial support, publicly stating, “While favored with health, I feel competent to earn an honest livelihood for myself and family.” His unwillingness to accept help had several sources. He was, and had every right to be, proud of the things he had accomplished largely on his own, and that pride and the self-confidence that went with it were not likely to evaporate even in this moment of distress. Because he was still besieged by creditors both honest and conniving, and was and would continue to spend many hours defending himself in court, any gifts or loans publicly known might soon be attached in legal proceedings. But, finally, he could fall back on the truth expressed by one of his favorite witticisms, drawn from the King James Version of First Corinthians: “Without Charity, I am nothing.” Because enough of his wealth had been put in Charity’s name, safe from legal challenges, he could afford to take the time he needed to wade through the mess he had created—or as he constantly emphasized, the mess created by the deception of others.12
Perhaps the most welcome and the most heartfelt of all the offers Barnum received in his first months of bankruptcy came from Tom Thumb, now all of eighteen years old. Filled with the usual dreadful puns about his size, Tom’s letter acknowledged the many people who had offered Barnum help and asked to be remembered as someone who belonged to “that mighty crowd.” Although he was in Philadelphia at the start of a western tour, he pledged himself “ready to go on to New-York, bag and baggage, and remain at Mrs. Barnum’s service as long as I, in my small way, can be useful.” He mentioned that he had pulled in two thousand customers at a single performance that very day and volunteered to help Barnum “attract all New-York.” Whether or not the letter was intended for publication, it feels, for all its sincerity, like a performance, and Barnum soon saw it published in the Tribune. The showman declined even this offer from his friend, but soon enough he and the little general would be collaborating again, although far from Philadelphia or New York.13
TAKEN TOGETHER, THE REACTIONS TO Barnum’s autobiography and bankruptcy provided an unusual, and unusually intense, public evaluation of a person still in his forties who was not a presidential candidate, a general, or an explorer. Barnum had become so familiar a public figure that by this time in his life his name was often used in the newspapers, and presumably in private conversation, as shorthand for a number of qualities: energetic promotion or self-promotion, interest in the odd or the exotic, business acumen and the ability to beat out competition, and, finally and foremost, the vast realm of humbug. In the United States, the British Isles, and Europe, Barnum embodied an identifiable American type—the go-getter—and was also one of the most renowned examples of the growing fluidity in social class that was a central factor of life on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century.
Barnum’s financial success was one thing, but his acceptance by the British upper class in the 1840s and by such prominent Americans as Commodore Vanderbilt and Horace Greeley in the 1850s suggested that a person could move not only from rags to riches but even from obscurity to respectability. This proposition was what made him such a controversial figure, someone whom Bennett and many other editors could routinely denounce to an audience eager to see Barnum put in his place, a man whom Emerson and members of the intelligentsia in the United States and Britain could find both sneer-worthy and also alarming. That the middle classes responded so readily to what Barnum offered—to his hoaxes and publicity stunts but also to the way he challenged them to see with their own eyes and rely on their own judgment—was partly what defenders of tradition, the perquisites of class, the intellectual elite, and culture itself, as they saw it, were railing against when they attacked Barnum. Yes, his smugness was irritating, but it was his role as a leader of the mob assaulting the citadels of culture—for example, by undermining serious theater with his moralistic melodramas—that made him a palpable threat.
Even those who sneered, however, could get Barnum’s place with the average American just about right. John Delaware Lewis, the British son of a Russian merchant whose sneering came by way of Eton and Cambridge, made a jaunt to the United States and brought back sketches collected in 1851 as Across the Atlantic. “By ‘going-a-head’ to an extent hitherto unprecedented in his trade—devoid of any absurd delicacy as to the means by which the ends are to be accomplished,” Lewis observed, Barnum “has endeared himself to the middle and lower ranks of his countrymen, and seems to stand forth proud and preeminent as their model of a speculator and a man.” Lewis might not have fully approved, but he recognized Barnum’s preeminence. The perennial popularity of the American Museum, the robust sales of the autobiography, the widespread appeal of his nostrums for success in business, and the eagerness of newspapers across the land to print any snatch of news or gossip about him all proved that, for all his faults, “Old Barnum” was, in our striving, democratic country, the object more often of respectful affection than of scorn.14
BY EARLY DECEMBER 1856, WEARY of the financial shell game and legal wrangling that took up so much of his time, and longing for his old life as a showman, Barnum set sail for Liverpool, where nearly thirteen years earlier he had landed with Tom Thumb to begin their successful campaign to win over the British public. The little general himself would soon join him again, but for the moment, Barnum accompanied “an exceedingly talented trio, Mr. & Mrs. Howard & their little daughter, Cordelia, an exquisite actress of eight years.” The Howards were known for playing in the musical version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and little Cordelia broke hearts as the soulful Little Eva. Once he reached Liverpool, Barnum went back to the Royal Waterloo Hotel, where he was now friendly with the staff, marveling over how little they and the hotel had changed over the years, and ordered again the meal he had first had there, “fried soles and shrimp sauce.”15
As was the case on that first trip to England, he came without bookings but soon approached theater managers with the pitch that, given his dire financial straits, “I should never have crossed the Atlantic with an attraction which I did not know possessed every element of immense success.” Soon both the Howards and Tom Thumb were “making much money” for Barnum in London and other English cities, and as a result, “my health & spirits are much better than I would like to have many suppose.” Charity was also feeling stronger, and by late spring she and two of their daughters, Helen and Pauline, joined him in London. Meanwhile he was dining often with old friends like Thackeray, Albert Smith, Julius Benedict and Giovanni Belletti, and various theater managers and journalists. Otto Goldschmidt visited him with an offer of help from Jenny Lind and encouraged him to move to Dresden, where he and Jenny lived and where he said that Barnum could live frugally.16
But the financial picture was brightening, and after the Howards returned to America, Barnum and Tom Thumb went to Germany, via Paris and Strasbourg. The general appeared at various spas in Germany, including Baden-Baden—“a delightful little town, cleaner and neater than any city I had ever visited.” The high-rolling clientele, who visited these spa towns as much for their gambling establishments as for taking the waters, supported large admissions charges for Tom’s exhibitions. These performances soon became “the most profitable that had ever been given,” permitting Barnum to send thousands of dollars back home to help clear his debts and buy back some of his former holdings. The two men went on to Holland, where Barnum was once again hugely impressed by the local neatness and cleanliness, in which the country was “evidently not next to, but far ahead of godliness.” But the frugality of the Dutch made it harder to fill seats for Tom’s performances, so he and the general spent most of their time sightseeing before returning to England.17
In early summer, almost before his family had had time to settle in with him in a London suburb, he was off again by steamship from Liverpool to New York. When he walked along the familiar blocks of Broadway he had the opposite experience of the one he had had when he first returned from London, when people who had formerly turned away from him cozied up because of his newfound wealth: “I saw old and prosperous friends coming, but before I came anywhere near them, if they espied me they would dodge into a store, or cross the street . . . or they would become very much interested in something that was going on.” He calls these people his “butterfly friends” and professes to have been delighted for “the opportunity to learn this sad but most needful lesson.” He stayed in America long enough to be rejoined by his wife and daughters for the marriage of his second daughter, Helen, in Bridgeport on October 7.18
After the wedding, having been advised that his staying around might make it easier for his agents to settle his remaining debts, he returned to New York. His financial outlook was now such that he took up lodging in the luxurious confines of the Astor House. One thing that had not been settled was Iranistan, which had not been lived in since the Barnums had decamped two years before. His Bridgeport assignee had not been overly eager to sell the place, perhaps sympathetic to Barnum’s wish to reclaim it if his finances improved enough to allow him to do so. But the attorney did hire workmen to keep the house in sufficiently good shape to sell if necessary. Barnum wrote that these carpenters and painters had been warned not to smoke in the house but had developed the habit of eating lunch in the large dome room and then smoking a pipe afterward, which Barnum suspected led to an errant ash.
For on December 18 his half brother Philo telegrammed Barnum in New York with jarring news: Iranistan had caught fire the night before and was now ashes. “My beautiful Iranistan was gone!” Barnum wrote. During his financial troubles he had failed to make all the payments on his insurance policies for the house, and those he held were valued at only $28,000. Eventually the grounds and outbuildings were sold for $50,000, and both of those sums went into retiring his debt, but it was a marked loss for Barnum. The sewing-machine inventor Elias Howe Jr. bought the grounds in the summer of 1859, intending to build his own impressive house there, but somehow he never did. For his part, Barnum had a narrow, mile-long, artificial lake in East Bridgeport dredged out in the fall of 1859, with the idea of rebuilding Iranistan there, but nothing came of that plan either.19
Barnum soon returned to England, leaving Charity and their youngest daughter, Pauline, living in Fairfield with Caroline and her husband, David. The showman joined Tom Thumb again to tour Scotland and Wales, once more taking in good profits. But after some months he realized that the general could generate plenty of cash without his personal oversight.
Hearing the “old clocks” ticking in his ear, Barnum now reinvented himself again, as a public lecturer. He took the advice of American friends in London to get up a talk called “The Art of Money-Getting.” The basis for the talk would be a list of ten rules for business success that Barnum had created in 1852 for a prolific Philadelphia author named Edwin T. Freedley, who published the list in his 1853 book, A Practical Treatise on Business, which also included a chapter by Horace Greeley titled “The True Man of Business.” Freedley told his readers that he delayed the book for three weeks while waiting for Barnum’s response, referring to the showman as “the ablest tactician, and one of the most successful business men of the age.” Barnum had published a slimmed-down version of the list in The Life of P. T. Barnum in 1855, and now he would greatly fatten it up with examples, anecdotes, funny stories, and a great dose of common sense masquerading as wisdom.20
Or perhaps it was wisdom. Commonsensical advice included the following: pick a business you are suited for; work hard and persevere; hire good people; and don’t count on others to do your job for you. Advice that came out of his own experience included “let your pledged word ever be sacred”; “be not too visionary”; “engage in one kind of business only”; “advertise”; and “live considerably within your income.” His wisdom, hard won, also included “Prosperity is a more severe ordeal than adversity, especially sudden prosperity.”21
Barnum seems to have spent a good deal of time preparing the lecture, joking to his friends that, given the clock catastrophe and his own bankruptcy, he should call the talk “The Art of Money-Losing.” But they spurred him on by reminding him that he could not have lost money without first having made it and that the public was well aware (thanks to Barnum himself) of how much wealth he had accumulated from the Jenny Lind tour and other ventures.
He gave his lecture for the first time on December 29, 1858, at St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly, a concert venue decorated in Moorish style that had opened earlier in the year with a choral performance led by his old friend Julius Benedict. Seated on the narrow, light-green horsehair benches in the hall were the Americans who had encouraged him, plus “all my theatrical and literary friends” and critics from the press.22
The next day’s Times gave his lecture high marks, pointing out that there was no odor of the charlatan about Barnum, but that he came across as a “thoroughly respectable man of business.” The paper’s critic praised his “fund of dry humor that convulses everybody with laughter, while he himself remains perfectly serious.” The text of the speech appears in the 1869 autobiography, refined and expanded after much use over the ensuing decade. It does not contain many opportunities for convulsive laughter, so Barnum must have ad-libbed freely, his deadpan delivery magnifying the humor. The critic made a point of praising his “sonorous” voice, which is of particular note because there has long existed the myth that his voice was squeaky.23
The Times was not alone in its high opinion of his performance. Barnum exulted, “My own lavish advertisements were as nothing to the notoriety which the London newspapers voluntarily and editorially gave to my new enterprise.” Here Barnum did not exaggerate. The victory must have been especially sweet since he had learned years before that the London papers could not be bought off with advertising money, unlike many of their American counterparts of the time. Barnum concluded, “The city thus prepared the provinces to give me a cordial reception.”24
He would deliver the speech nearly a hundred times in the first five months of 1859, both in the provinces and in the city of London. Advertised as the “Science of Money-Making,” not the art, and promising “an original definition of HUMBUG,” the presentation would also include “pictorial illustrations.” Having managed to procure from his friend Moses Kimball that desiccated thing the Fejee Mermaid, he exhibited it on his tour through the countryside. He seemed especially pleased with his performances in Oxford and Cambridge, where he had years before received the usual rough treatment from the undergraduates and was prepared to receive it again, “fully resolved to put up with whatever offered.” When a Cambridge student interrupted his lecture on February 21 by calling out a question about Joice Heth, Barnum pushed back by saying he would gladly give the student “all the information I possess concerning your deceased relative.” The quip feels ugly today, but Barnum believed it made the students less eager to tangle with him. A local newspaper had a different impression, calling the students “very disorderly” and subjecting Barnum to “many interruptions and shouts of derision.” The newspaperman dismissed Barnum’s talk as “nothing but a string of anecdotes” about how he had humbugged the public, and his wounding conclusion was that “Barnum appears to be a vain, elderly man, on the best possible terms with himself.”25
At Oxford on February 25, Barnum announced at the outset, “You have paid me liberally for the single hour of my time which is at your service,” and pointed out that they could spend that time listening to him or indulging in their own tomfoolery. When the audience tested this proposition by energetically singing “Yankee Doodle,” Barnum took a seat on the stage and contentedly waited them out. Several more such interruptions happened, but he kept both his good humor and an eye on his watch. When the hour was up, he stopped abruptly and the audience swelled forward, congratulating him on “a jolly good time.” Ticket sales for that single hour in Oxford amounted to £169, or about $850 in 1859 dollars.26
Barnum returned home in early June on the steamship Africa to be with Charity, whose health was failing. As he wrote to Moses Kimball, “My poor Charity continues very ill.” She and their unmarried daughter were now either boarding with Caroline and her husband or living cheaply in a small rented house. In his note to Kimball he added about his own health, “I am not quite well as the clock wheels are running in my head yet & make me dizzy sometimes.” He had left behind in England an eight-page pamphlet of his speech, selling for two shillings. If the advertising for the text was not quite as energetic as that for his public deliveries of it, still it kept his name before the British public. Although the provincial halls had not always been full and, especially in the smaller towns, the reception had not always been as enthusiastic as in London, all in all, his lecture tour was the “source of very considerable emolument to me.”27
He spent the rest of 1859 actively overcoming that clock-wheel dizziness, focused on the American Museum from behind the scenes, booking acts, finding new dramas and new exotic objects. In the fall he went into business with the singers Henri and Susanna Drayton to offer opera bouffe or parlor opera to New York and other cities, which the couple undertook with an ambitious series of appearances. Before 1860 had progressed very far, Barnum could write to a friend that the American Museum was bringing him $90,000 a year, although he told a much different story to those still making claims, legitimate and not, on his Jerome Clock paper. But even the Herald admitted in late 1859 that Barnum had in effect pulled himself out of debt and vowed to sin no more in a financial way. Combining the income from his various ventures, selling lots in East Bridgeport and other property, adding in Charity’s own income, and relying on her frugality if not always his own, he had over a period of five years paid off the bulk of what he owed and was now ready to tell the world, “Richard’s himself again.”28
Although advertisements in the New York papers had continued to tout “Barnum’s American Museum” throughout the years when Greenwood and Butler were nominally its proprietors and Barnum simply its agent, he was now ready to regain his status as the legal owner, showing everyone that he was in every way again in charge. He bought back the rights to the museum’s contents on March 17, 1860, and then took official possession of the museum a week later. That night, before he closed the building for a week of refurbishment, he spoke from the museum’s stage to a sympathetic full house, giving his side of the story of his financial recovery; offering thanks to those who had helped him through, starting with Charity and ending with John Greenwood (to whom “I owe much of my present position of self-congratulation”), who would stay on as his second in command at the museum; and pledging to rededicate himself to the museum “as a popular place of family resort.” Barnum wrote, “This off-hand speech was received with almost tumultuous applause,” but whatever the decibel level of its reception, the speech was clearly anything but off-hand and soon was being peddled as a pamphlet titled “Barnum on His Feet Again.”29
In a notice headed, with the standard editorial indifference to spelling, “Barnum’s Last Pronunciamiento,” the Herald was eager to poke fun, calling the speech a “refreshing piece of blarney” and referring to the showman as “Chevalier Barnum,” accusing him of “giving a great many words and very few facts, and meaning nothing in particular.” Comparing his career with that of William Niblo, the Herald suggested, “Something is wanting in the furniture of the Chevalier’s mental household”: namely, common sense. Barnum and Niblo were both “naturally clever men,” Bennett’s paper conceded, but Niblo kept to the show business he knew, while Barnum was “overrating his own powers” and involving himself in businesses he should have left alone. Niblo, it concluded, was now retiring as a millionaire, “while Barnum goes to work again a poor man, looking for another Joice Heth.”30
Leaving aside the now long-standing animus Bennett had exhibited toward Barnum, the paper can be forgiven for its skepticism about the sincerity of a speech that even Barnum saw as filled with self-congratulation. Given that the American Museum had continued to buy almost daily ads in the newspaper that Bennett owned, his enthusiasm for taking Barnum on was in admirable contrast to the prevailing journalistic ethics of the day.
ONE SIGN THAT BARNUM WAS back on his feet was his breaking ground on a new house that would be next door to one he had constructed for his daughter Caroline after her 1852 marriage. He and Charity had been without a permanent place to live since leaving Iranistan, and now his wife’s health “was much impaired, and she especially needed a fixed residence which she could call ‘home.’ ” The site was about six hundred yards northwest of where Iranistan had been, also in the town of Fairfield. With the help of Caroline and his old friend the poet Bayard Taylor, he would name the Italianate-style house Lindencroft, not in honor of Jenny Lind but because a grove of linden trees adorned the grounds. “All that taste and money could do,” Barnum declared, “was fairly lavished on Lindencroft.” Saxon writes that the house was a hundred feet deep. Although substantial, it was not nearly as imposing from the front as Iranistan. Like the earlier house, the new one featured a large fountain out front, but otherwise “no attempt at ostentation” was made, Barnum said, hardly needing to add that Iranistan had been all ostentation. Lindencroft was not meant to be a symbol of his success or a calling card for his business, but was built purely for “convenience and comfort.” Charity, who had become an accomplished gardener, filled the grounds with “rare and beautiful flowers” to go with its walks, arbors, lawns, gardens, trees, and shrubs. For both of them, the house was “a labor of love,” and Barnum hoped to live out his days there.31
Barnum had undoubtedly been deeply rattled by his financial comeuppance, but when his natural disposition to look on “the bright side of things” began to pull him out of the doldrums, Charity did not escape them as easily as he did, and continued to feel downcast. He also had to contend with the unhappiness of his children, who “had been brought up in luxury; accustomed to call on servants to attend to every want.” Even if he was back on his feet, his family’s circumstances remained for a time diminished from what they had been at their height. It is not hard to imagine that one reason he had returned to England to tour with Tom Thumb was to escape their misery. Once he started to make money again, his life soon enough became all fried soles and shrimp sauce in the best hotels. Still, he had made a conscientious effort to pay off his debts, and he had publicly vowed to continue improving himself.
In his letter to his Connecticut neighbors soon after his bankruptcy and in his speech at the museum four years later, Barnum claimed to have learned that “there are, in this world, some things vastly better than the Almighty Dollar!” But in the same speech he acknowledged that “business activity is a necessity of my nature” and emphasized that, on the cusp of fifty years of age, he had no desire to retire. His natural inclination for business would never leave him, and given his genius for it, he would continue to accumulate dollars, almighty or not. But his faith led him to believe that his troubles had been God’s way of teaching him to be a better person, and in the three decades left to him, he managed, in this regard, to do what he saw as God’s will. The charitable way in which his true friends had treated him, offering him loans and often buying up his debt and allowing him to discharge it at less than its face value, had also made an impression on him. His quip about his being nothing without Charity seems to have been a lesson he now took to heart. He would become more generous in his dealings with others, and as his wealth accumulated again, he would give more and more of it away, not only in “profitable philanthropy” but in the sort that has no strings attached beyond proving to himself that he was not nothing.